The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

America's idealism began to fade during the Reagan administration after being severely damaged during the Nixon years. Reagan secretly traded weapons for hostages in Iran, while giving chemical weapons to Iraq, also without any authority except his own and done in complete secrecy.

America's idealism was replaced with American duplicity. Exceptional America became an illusion in the 1980s . The CIA under Reagan created Al Qaeda, funding and training them to fight Russia in Afghanistan. Putin remembers remembers this, so his hatred of the US is deep. He will pursue an agenda that  hurts the West as long as he is in a position to do so.

America's idealism became naivete when GWBush and Dick Cheney lied America into a war of imperialism based on known lies and doctored foreign intelligence reports.

Under Reagan America went from the world’s biggest creditor nation to the world’s biggest debtor nation. Tax cuts were implemented and the deficit deliberately allowed to balloon so that downsizing our government would be required to balance the budget. (Once taxes are cut, it is very difficult to reestablish prior tax rates.)

America fell from first place in educated population to 17th, upward mobility virtually ended and the wealth divide between the haves and the rest of us became the largest in the world.

America or a great part of it ceased to care about the least among its population. Decades of policy revision since Reagan had the effect of making the very rich much more wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class. Psychological warfare against the poor and middle class succeeded in isolating them. A parade of right wing propaganda on social issues was manufactured to distract and divide the uneducated poor.

Because public education is largely funded through property taxes, educational resources for the poor diminished while the far better resourced and funded schools in wealthy areas insured that the divide between the privileged and the poor continued to grow. Not satisfied with this oppression, the privileged are now deliberately undermining public education, planning to replace it with a system of corporate private schools, offering “vouchers” to the poor. Vouchers will then be cut over time to reduce the resources available to the poor.

In the same way, “vouchers’ are being promoted as a replacement for social security and medicare, again giving the privileged a tool to further steal from the poor and middle class over time.

Globalization of commerce at the urging of multinational corporations has enabled them to move skilled and unskilled work from countries with unions and a strong middle class to counties with large populations of poor and desperate people. Recessions are created in wealthy countries, forcing wage and benefit cuts and creating a pool of poor and desperate people in the advanced nations.

These things did not just "happen." All of them have been policy goals of the Right Wing for decades.

I'm tired of paying for welfare queens

I'm tired of paying the salary of Supreme Court Justices who have a vested interest in the success of corporations. I'm tired of paying for the health care of Walmart and other big box and fast food workers because they won't pay their employees a living wage or provide insurance. I'm tired of paying the oil industry $22 million a day. I am tired of highly profitable companies getting tax breaks and abatements, loopholes, and overseas tax shelters. And I am Really tired of hearing all our financial problems being blamed on people who are struggling to make it through one more day.

West Virginia

When babies died many years ago, and perhaps today, despite the best efforts of the parents, doctors often attributed it to "failure to thrive." Sometimes our aging parents die the same way, refusing their meds and believing highly trained healthcare providers don't know what's best. Watching my home state of West Virginia from afar, I get the eerie feeling that political entities can do the same thing. Sane people can be so outnumbered by the impaired that death from "failure to thrive" is always imminent.

Maryland

I love my adopted state of Maryland. It is tolerant, progressive, and has many natural and geographic advantages. And it has the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the world and a real treasure. It has many beautiful rural areas, yet is a very densely populated state. It’s population is larger than Oregon, Colorado, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Alabama, South Carolina, Iowa, Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska and others. It also has a larger population than Denmark, Finland, Slovakia, Norway, Lebanon, Ireland, New Zealand, Uruguay, Mongolia, and many others. When people see it on a map it looks like a small state. It has a big heart, and it is an economic powerhouse. Just wanted to get this out there.